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Propaganda's
Triumph

By
Robert Parry
May 30, 2001

The
defection of Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords from the Republican Party brought
into sharp relief the contrast between George W. Bush’s mantra about
changing the negative tone of Washington and the reality.

The conservative Washington Times
may have expressed the schizophrenia best on its May 24 editorial page.
The newspaper, which is financed by South Korean theocrat Rev. Sun Myung
Moon, highlighted what it called the “outrage of the week” in an
editorial that accused Senate Democrats of delivering “a major hit” to
“the political civility that President George W. Bush committed himself
to restore in Washington.”

The editorial complained that
Democratic leaders had balked at a plan to let 98-year-old Sen. Strom
Thurmond, R-S.C., skip some late-night votes by “pairing” him with a
Democratic senator who would agree not to vote. Though this decision seems
to have come from the Democratic leadership, the Times tossed in freshman
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for blame, with a gratuitous slap at profits
she made from commodities trading in the 1970s.

Then, in its own strange
“pairing” – given the concern for civility – the Times published a
crude editorial cartoon depicting Jeffords with donkey ears. “If he
talks like a jackass, walks like a jackass, looks like a jackass, and
calls himself an elephant, then he’s probably a dumb jackass,” the
Washington Times cartoonist wrote.

This unblushing juxtaposition of
high-minded language about civility and the politics of insult has become
typical of this new political landscape in which language grows ever more
distant from reality. Bush’s supporters, in particular, wax eloquent
about their commitment to political gentility while continuing the
opposite behavior, without a wince for the hypocrisy.

The Jeffords defection, which cost
Republicans control of the Senate, ripped off the genteel masks big time.
The Wall Street Journal dubbed Jeffords “a big baby” in one online
editorial. “Benedict Jeffords,” howled the headline of the New York
Post.

The National Review’s Jonah
Goldberg observed ruefully, “I know that it’s illegal to sew a
half-starved weasel into his small intestine, but there are other
options.” [For a compilation of these and other conservative comments
about Jeffords, see The Washington Post, May 25, 2001]

Judicial Restraint?

Beyond language, the events of the
past decade have made clear that even the application of law is now just a
political weapon.

On the same days as the civility
editorial and the Jeffords-jackass cartoon, The Washington Times carried
advertisements for a “tribute to Honorable N. Sanders Sauls,” the
Florida judge who rejected Vice President Al Gore’s motion for a Florida
recount after Sauls had eaten up precious time last fall and then refused
to examine the ballots that had been introduced as evidence. [WT, May 24,
2001]

This latest Sanders Sauls tribute
– scheduled for June 7 – is sponsored by the right-wing Judicial
Watch, which filed an endless string of lawsuits against Democrats during
the Clinton administration and intervened on Bush’s behalf in the
recount battle. Sauls, who apparently sees nothing wrong in siding openly
with partisan factions, also is being honored in June by the
FreeRepublic.com group, another far-right collection of Clinton-haters.

But the Right’s media and attack
groups are not alone in their campaign to consolidate public opinion
around the legitimacy of Bush’s ascension to the presidency. Elements of
the mainstream news media, which increasingly moves in synch with the
conservative media, are serving that effort as well.

In a May 16 column, Washington
Post columnist Michael Kelly torched those who still object to Bush’s
victory or see a pro-Bush tilt in the media. To make his point, Kelly
blended three old and new myths about the national press corps.

A 'Liberal' Media

Kelly’s argument opens with the
old canard about a “liberal” news media.

The core of this argument –
dating back about a quarter century – is that surveys have found
Washington journalists more likely to vote Democratic than Republican,
though some more refined studies, such as one sponsored by Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting, judged working journalists generally more liberal
than the average Americans on social issues while more conservative on
economic ones.

Nevertheless, the fundamental
illogic of the “liberal” media argument is the supposition that
working reporters control the news coverage, rather than the people who
own the newspapers and television networks.

The key -- and obvious -- point is
that the owners set the editorial policies and hire editors who enforce
these policies. Reporters are essentially hired help whose careers rise or
fall depending on how well they please the news executives.

Hypothetically, for instance, a
poll of the news staff at the New York Post might show that rank-and-file
editorial workers favored Gore over Bush, say, 2-to-1, a not-unreasonable
supposition given the newspaper’s base in New York City. Using the
“liberal media” logic then, one would conclude that the New York Post
was an overwhelmingly liberal newspaper.

What that “logic” would miss,
however, is that the owner, Rupert Murdoch, is a conservative who hires
senior editors who reflect his point of view. These editors decide how
stories are assigned, edited and placed within the newspaper. They also
write the editorials, pick the columnists – and fire or demote reporters
who don’t get with the program.

Therefore, it matters little that
the lady writing obits might have voted for Gore or that the fellow
putting headlines on wire copy might have voted for Bush. What matters is
the political perspective of the people in charge.

Kelly, who is editor of The
Atlantic, writes as if he’s oblivious to this basic fact of journalistic
life.

A Second Myth

Kelly’s second myth was his
insistence that “independent news organizations have reported that,
under almost any conceivable scenario of recounting the Florida vote,
George W. Bush beat Al Gore.” Kelly wrote that because of this supposed
fact, “the cry that Bush is a robber-president has lost a bit of
oomph.”

Again, Kelly either was not aware
of the latest news from Florida or chose to ignore it. The
most recent findings of the unofficial newspaper studies of the
Florida vote indicate that Gore – not only was the winner nationally by
more than half a million votes – but was the choice of Florida voters.

USA Today estimated that Gore lost
a net of 15,000 to 25,000 votes from confusion over poorly designed
ballots – far more than Bush’s 537-vote official margin.

Yet, even ignoring those spoiled
ballots, the Miami Herald and USA Today found that Gore would have won
under reasonable standards for judging the clear intent of voters.

Gore would have defeated Bush by 242
votes if a statewide recount had counted so-called “overvotes” –
those mistakenly kicked out by machine counters as having more than one
presidential choice – and “undervotes” with perforated chads or
multiple indentations, indicating that a malfunctioning voting machine had
prevented voters from punching through their choice for president and
other races.

Gore’s margin would have been
larger if ballots with indentations only for president were counted, too.
Bush would have prevailed only if all ballots with indentations were
thrown out, the newspapers found. [USA Today, Miami Herald, May 11, 2001]

So, Kelly’s assertion that Gore
lost under “almost any conceivable scenario” is wrong.

A Flawed Study

The third myth in Kelly’s column
was his reliance on a new study by a group calling itself the Project for
Excellence in Journalism, an organization funded by the Pew Charitable
Trust.

This group put out a report that
purported to find that “contrary to Democratic complaints, George W.
Bush has not gotten an easier ride from the American media in the first
100 days than Bill Clinton did in his famously rocky start. … Despite a
very good first month, Bush’s coverage overall was actually less
positive than Bill Clinton’s eight years ago.”

Rather than show any skepticism
about these findings, which clash with any clear recollection of the harsh
treatment of Clinton versus the rave reviews for Bush, Kelly embraces the
report as if it were holy writ.

Kelly even cites as support for
his position an article by The Washington Post’s John Harris. But
Harris’ article actually had concluded the
opposite, that Bush’s coverage indeed was softer than Clinton’s.
“The truth is, this new president has done things with relative impunity
that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton,”
Harris wrote, [WP, May 6, 2001]

In his May 16 column, Kelly also
forgets that he was one of the commentators who earlier had perceived a
friendly media attitude toward Bush. In a March 7 column listing several
factors in Bush’s early success, Kelly wrote that Bush “benefits from
an easy and shallow charm, which is useful in winning over an easy and
shallow press corps.” [Washington Post, March 7, 2001]

Yet, this one Pew-funded study
swept away all the observations of Bush getting an easy ride. In a
different journalistic time, a study that sharply conflicted with what was
apparent to nearly any observer would draw its own scrutiny. What
methodology was employed? Were the judgments slanted for some reason?

Any careful examination of the
report would have shown it not to be worth the money that Pew ponied up
for it. As Bob Somerby of DailyHowler.com
has noted, the Pew-funded report covered not the first 100 days as
advertised, but only the first 60. (Actually, the study examined about 30
days of the first 60 days, according to the study’s methodology.)

Limited Sample

More importantly, the study based
its conclusions on a very narrow – and to a great extent, outdated –
selection of news outlets.

The study looked at only two
newspapers, The Washington Post and The New York Times. No examination was
given of the increasingly influential conservative news media or even
major regional newspapers. There was no counting of articles from The
Washington Times, the New York Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Miami
Herald, or the Los Angeles Times.

It’s also not clear why the
Pew-funded study did not look at the two biggest-circulation newspapers,
USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. Since The Washington Post and The
New York Times both endorsed Clinton and Gore, their editorial pages could
be expected to be more supportive of Clinton and more critical of Bush,
the key fact that skewed the findings.

By contrast, if the Wall Street
Journal had been used, its relentlessly anti-Clinton, pro-Bush opinion
articles would have tipped the survey in a different direction.

As for magazines, the study
checked out only one -- Newsweek. There was no tabulation of the coverage
in Murdoch’s Weekly Standard or other influential right-wing journals,
such as the American Spectator, National Review and Moon’s Insight
magazine.

For television, the survey was
slightly broader but still missed the point about how today’s media
influences the public.

The study looked at the evening
news programs from CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS. It ignored coverage from the
cable networks and the pundit programs, major shapers of political
opinion. The study ignored MSNBC and its roster of loudmouth commentators,
as well as Murdoch’s conservative-leaning Fox News and AOL Time
Warner’s CNN.

Other important media outlets,
such as talk radio, were missed altogether, although the impact of the
conservative voices of Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy were central to
tearing down Clinton at the start of his administration and building up
Bush at the start of his.

The Pew-funded study had other
major shortcomings, endemic to such efforts to categorize coverage as
"positive" or "negative" and equate that with
fairness. The simple fact is that some actions are more deserving of
critical coverage than others.

To say, for instance, that most
coverage of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, has been negative would not
necessarily mean the coverage was unfair. Similarly, politicians deserve
negative coverage sometimes and other times they don’t.

One might hope that the Project
for Excellence in Journalism would have exhibited a more sophisticated
understanding of the workings of journalism. But this Pew-financed
operation seems to be living in the 1950s when a couple of mainstream
newspapers could dominate the media agenda and the major TV networks had a
lock on what the public would hear from broadcast news.

Trashing the White House

This approach to quantifying
coverage also misses the journalistic twists of individual stories. The
first weeks of the new Bush administration, for instance, were dominated
as much by critical coverage of former President Clinton as they were by
positive coverage of Bush.

One of the principal tales was the
story of Clinton aides allegedly trashing the White House and stripping
Air Force One before departing. The story received front-page coverage in
The Washington Post and was trumpeted on the pundit shows and across much
of the national news media.

In this case, the Bush White House
played a clever game. Officially, Bush's surrogates acted magnanimous in
urging the press not to make too big a deal of the vandalism. On
background, Bush's operatives fed the press juicy tidbits about slashed
wiring, pornographic graffiti and looted government property.

Typical of the media’s lack of
journalistic rigor when dealing with negative Clinton stories, the
Washington press corps did not demand proof of the vandalism, such as
photographs or other hard evidence.Instead, the
press corps simply published unattributed accounts of vengeful Democrats
ransacking government property, a theme that meshed well with Bush’s
public call for a restoration of dignity in the White House.

Nearly four months later, the
General Services Administration issued a report finding no evidence that
Clinton’s aides had trashed the White House. “The condition of the
real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when
tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy,” the federal
landlord agency said.

Unlike the front-page treatment of
the allegations, the GSA report was either buried deep in newspapers or
ignored altogether. The Washington Post ran a wire story on page A13 on
May 18, 2001.

Nine days later, Jake Siewart,
Clinton’s last press secretary, wrote an opinion column published in the
Post’s Outlook section. “After years of watching the Washington press
corps at work, I know it’s pointless to ask for apologies,” Siewart
wrote. “Apparently, most of the commentators and reporters who reported
this story four months ago have ‘moved on.’ Being a journalist today
means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Siewart contrasted the apocryphal
damage to the White House to the real damage to the reputation of Clinton
aides. “The Clinton staff, who offered the new Bush team detailed
briefing books, one-on-one meetings and personal tours to make the
transition seamless, got to go home and have their reputations trashed by
the people they had helped. All in the name of ‘changing the tone’ in
Washington. And the press corps did not just sit back and watch the
vandals at work; it lent a hand.” [WP, May 27, 2001]

A New Era

What all this indicates is that
the nation has entered a new era -- not one of political civility but one
in which the words of day-to-day political discourse have grown almost
fully estranged from any real meaning or attachment to fact. Propaganda
– not journalism – is ascendant.

Yet, rather than climbing the
ramparts to battle for the traditional values of journalism – reason,
fairness and truth – many Washington media figures have chosen to spare
themselves and their careers.

In the 1980s, Robert Parry
broke many of the Iran-contra stories for The Associated Press and
Newsweek.